2014B Day 22: On every run, a little rain must fall

Metaphorical rain in this case, not actual rain – don’t panic!

I’m told there’s a blog post like this one on every run, though I’ve been lucky enough to avoid being here for them so far. Tonight, we had a few technical difficulties. For those of you in the know, this picture speaks volumes.

In good news, today was empanada Sunday. I didn’t take a picture of mine as I was scarfing them down, but I did take a picture of my delightful dinner. Those things that look like pears are actually cheesy potatoes in the shape of pears. So creative!

I’m headed down the mountain tomorrow, and want to give one last shout-out to Jared and Katie, the heart and soul of MagAO. [Don’t worry Laird, you can be the brain.] They’re down here away from home for a whole 6 weeks, cheerfully and tirelessly supporting observers on good nights (most) and bad (very few) AND blogging about it so that us slackers who get to go home can stay informed. You guys are the best!

Here’s a picture that Jared took of the “Three Ks” tonight. Good luck guys! Can’t wait to hear about your clever fix tomorrow.

I think tonight calls for a motivational song.

Update By Jared (after the Sun came up): Well that was horrific. I won’t try to explain all the things, but we managed to get MagAO back up off the mat and get some work done. During a final round of troubleshooting as the Sun was rising, we took these images:

The theta-1 Ori C binary in Trapezium. The image on the right contains no dirty tricks (no SAA = no shift-and-add, it means we didn’t align individual frames before stacking).

If you’ve been following MagAO, you’ve seen our previous images of these two stars. It looks like they’re about 4 mas closer now (caution: that’s control room astrophysics, which means it’s wrong in at least one way!).

Time for bed. Thanks for your help the last week Kate. See you back in Tucson.